What the child was in the Jewish home it became because of what its parents were toward it. To say that the Jewish mother has been unsurpassed in the history of men because she dreamed that a child by her borne might become a Messiah of its people does not quite touch the roots of the unbelievable tenderness and beauty of maternal dedication in the Jewish home. Neither is the relation of the Jewish father and child wholly to be explained by the fact of his involuntary aloofness from the world and his dependence upon the home for whatsoever of peace and joy this world could give him. It is not too much to say that the Messianic ideal of the Jewish mother and the fact of the Jew's exclusion from the world without may have tended to deepen and to hallow parental love, but the mystery abides not less wondrous in some ways than the mystery of Israel's survival. Certain perils, it might be imagined, were the inevitable accompaniment of or sequel to this wonderful love and reverence within the Jewish home,--the peril of repression of the inner life of the child chiefly and also of the parent. But students of Jewish history would hardly aver that the intellectual and spiritual nature of the child was really stifled or stunted by reason of the illimitable filial reverence. And if at times there was intellectual self-repression and spiritual self-surrender, who can measure the inmost and invisible gains which accrued to and rewarded the child? It is a happy thought of Renan[V] that all the joys of Israel are in reality an enlargement of the family life; their feast is a repast in common, the natural eucharist to which the poor is admitted, a thanksgiving for life as it is with its limits, which do not prevent it from being present under the eye of Jahweh who dispenses good and evil. The Fifth Commandment bade more than obedience on the part of children to parents; by indirection it enjoined parents and children alike to magnify the home, to make it the centre and core of Israel's life, so that it became the very salvation of Israel when no other salvation was at hand. The very name that is given to Israel, the house of Israel, seems to have been prophetic of what the family life of Israel was destined to be. The house of Israel and the life of the Jewish home became interchangeable terms. That the Jewish home safeguarded and perpetuated Israel through ages of darkness and tears and tragedy is true beyond peradventure. Whether this home-life in all its dignity and grandeur was the result of the ghetto is rather doubtful. The ghetto, which was the environment of the exile in its narrowest terms, gave to Israel an unique opportunity for the development of what might be called its genius for home-life. But if opportunity and genius conjoined to create the result, this genius was inspired and fortified from generation to generation by willing, even eager, obedience to the Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue.